Tag Archives: bookstore

For those of you who are unaware, Indie Thursday is a weekly Twitter event/meme/hashtag thingamajig started by friend of the blog Jenn. Basically, it’s a way to share what books you purchase at independent bookstores each week, by tweeting about it with the hashtag #IndieThursday. It comes a convenient 24 hours before Friday Reads, which is a similar method of sharing what you are reading every week. #FridayReads promotes reading as a social experience; #IndieThursday builds off of its momentum and promotes buying your reading material from human beings who live and work in your community. This blog strongly supports both. Obviously.

More often than not, my #IndieThursday books are purchased from Unabridged Bookstore in Lakeview, a neighborhood in Chicago, both because I have to drive past it several times a week and because it’s a wonderful bookstore in just about every way possible. I love bringing my nephew to the store after picking him up from daycare to let him choose a book to take home, and sometimes I splurge and get one for myself, too. They also order books for me that aren’t in stock, and it’s always been a fast, pleasant experience. I’m a fan.

When I set up this blog, my friends and I were about to lose our jobs as booksellers, and the store we called home was about to close forever. My goal was simple: to give us a place to continue sharing our love of reading, and to keep passing along the knowledge we had gained from working with books for so long. I made a conscious decision not to discuss the specific company we worked for. (I also decided not to mangle sentences in order to avoid ending them with prepositions.) There was no need to discuss the company’s mistakes; we lived in their shadow for years, and haven’t escaped it yet.

I made an exception and posted pictures of our store in The Ghosts of Borders Past because I wanted to share our personal experience with this corporation’s downfall. We are real people who took care of our books and had pride in our stores. We also watched everything we had built through the years get destroyed in a matter of weeks. Then we lost our jobs. I still didn’t feel that I wanted to write about it on our blog proper, but I let the pictures tell the story.

Now the last store in the company has closed, and there’s not much left to say except goodbye, and we will miss you. I still don’t want to use my blog for that purpose, but our friends at Word Hits have kindly hosted a fond farewell by yours truly. You can read it here: Closed Book: The Last Days at Borders.